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IFAD and International organisations and agencies reaffirm the need to devote more attention to the rural sector in Latin America and the Caribbean

By Salvador Santiesteban

On 9 October 2017 IFAD met with other United Nations agencies and
international financial organisations and institutions at the Universidad
Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina. Discussions revolved around the new
paradigms that are reconfiguring rural areas in Latin America and the
Caribbean, and participants reaffirmed the urgent need to devote more attention
to the rural sector.

The seminar was inaugurated by the
Governor of Mendoza, Alfredo Cornejo, whose words of welcome emphasised "the
need for more specific and intelligent interventions by public and private
agencies and, therefore, the tremendous benefit of everything that has been
done, and that can be done, in partnership with IFAD."

The event was particularly relevant to
a region such as Latin America where, despite considerable economic growth in
the last decade, 175 million inhabitants continue to live in poverty and
another 70 million suffer from extreme poverty. One out of every two Latin
Americans living in rural areas is poor. While the rate of poverty in Latin
American cities is 24 per cent, in rural areas this rate almost doubles to 46
per cent. The dramatic impacts of rural poverty are, furthermore, practically
invisible.

"In spite of these challenges,
Latin America as a region invests less, proportionally, in the agricultural
sector. During this meeting, IFAD and its partners reiterated the need to
reverse this trend and devote more attention to the rural sector",
commented Joaquín Lozano, Director of IFAD’s Latin America and the Caribbean
Division. "We are facing a decisive moment for agriculture and in the
fight against rural poverty, and this within the context of a critical moment
for rural development in Latin American and Caribbean countries", added
Lozano.

During the seminar the need was also
emphasised to transform the narrative that is currently marginalising rural
areas by taking advantage of the opportunities arising from the urbanisation
process to strengthen the links between urban and rural areas. Daniel Pizzi,
President of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, commented on this by
highlighting the need to examine the development of rurality and all its
cross-cutting elements, "which include not only agriculture, but also
infrastructure, climate change and social organisation, among other issues."

Hugo Beteta, Director of the
Subregional Headquarters for Mexico of the Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) highlighted the significant gaps that are
most often eclipsed by general statistical averages; therefore, he recommended that
all of IFAD’s strategies include an inequality-based approach. In Beteta’s
opinion, "the place, gender, ethnicity and class into which a person is
born determine to a great extent their fate. In fact, in Latin America, a
person’s origin is their destiny."

Inequality and exclusion were the
focus of a significant part of the discussions. After highlighting the solid
working relationship between IFAD and the Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations (FAO), Julio Berdegué, FAO’s Deputy Director General and
Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, affirmed that the
region has lost ground in rural poverty reduction in recent years, with only
five countries remaining consistent in their indicators. Berdegué highlighted
that the percentage of rural poor people who are destitute has increased from 50
per cent to 61 per cent in recent years. He therefore believes that persistent
poverty is not so much an issue of deficiencies as it is one of social
exclusion, an exclusion that, in the words of Ana Touza, Regional Adviser for
the World Food Programme (WFP), has the face of a woman and is rural,
indigenous, landless, without access to education and vulnerable to food
insecurity.

According to Edith Obschatko, Agricultural
Policy Specialist from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on
Agriculture (IICA), the current definition of the rural population is too
simplistic, and she highlighted that rurality is an essential part of each
country’s identity. This observation becomes especially relevant at a time when
the international community, and donors in particular, are giving greater
attention to low-income countries, in spite of the fact that 72 per cent of the
world’s poor live in middle-income countries. In this sense, Héctor Bravo, Chief
of Staff of Chile’s Agricultural Development Institute (INDAP) highlighted the
importance of targeting small-scale producers among native populations, and
within a framework that includes municipalities, to implement programmes that
are committed to reducing rural poverty.

In the case of Argentina, one of the
world’s main food exporters, one third of its 3.5 million rural inhabitants are
poor. Although the Government has made reducing poverty one of its priorities,
and significant progress has been made, poverty continues to be especially
severe in indigenous communities and it forces many rural young people to
migrate. Aylen Azzaro, a participant in the Inclusive Rural Development
Programme (PRODERI), financed by IFAD and implemented by the Unit for Rural
Change (UCAR), noted the challenges that many inhabitants of rural areas still
face in accessing water.

In his closing words, Mendoza’s
Minister of Economy, Infrastructure and Energy, Martín Kerchner, emphasised
that it is critical that all actors involved in rural development have a very
clear path to fulfil their mandate.

In the
second part of the seminar, Promoting and Financing Inclusive Rural
Transformation, the principal international development financial institutions
compared their respective definitions of the rural sector, the type of
agriculture that they promote, and their different financial strategies. They
also examined changes in the demand and supply of financial products to
evaluate the efficacy of current instruments and identify innovations.